We Built a Bestselling Substack Publication in Less Than 60 Days. Here's the Week-by-Week Breakdown.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
At Write • Build • Scale, we believe that writers and creators deserve to get paid for their work.
Yet, we know that monetizing your craft, experiences, or expertise isn’t always easy.
This publication exists because writing and getting paid for your writing are completely different things.
We’re here to help you:
Write online to share your story, message, experiences, or expertise with millions of people.
Build a loyal audience that appreciates your work.
And scale your income so you can spend more time doing what you genuinely love.
We’ve been doing all those things for the past five years but only joined Substack in 2024 to explore the opportunity to reach even more writers.
We launched the Write • Build • Scale publication and published our first Notes in July:
Three months later, we received our Bestseller badge, which means we crossed over 100 paid subscribers:
But here comes the bad news: We don’t have a secret hack or growth strategy that will help you quickly gain 100 paid subscribers or go viral on Substack.
Instead, this quick growth was possible thanks to nine weeks of dedicated action and a proper launch plan.
The good news is that our method will help you build your publication and audience on Substack in the long run — even if you’re starting from scratch.
Here’s everything we’ve done to become Bestsellers within 60 days:
Week #1: We Started With a Big Bang
Even though we’ve been new to Substack, we were welcomed with open arms and didn’t have to start from scratch for three reasons:
#1. We already had a newsletter with over 20,000 subscribers. We didn’t import any subscribers from Kit to Substack, but we did send an email announcement about our first Notes.
#2. Since we’ve already been writing on the internet for over six years, we have a strong network of successful writers. Some of them have been on Substack for years and left comments on our first posts, mentioning they were happy to see us here.
#3. Our friend Michael Simmons 🪵🔥 ⛺ invited us to participate in a Note-writing challenge in July, so we’ve been part of a cohort full of new Substackers who engaged with each other’s content daily. This helped us get a baseline of engagement on every post, regardless of how good or bad it was.
If you’ve ever started to publish on a new platform with an audience of zero followers, you’ll know how valuable that kind of support can be.
Despite those advantages, our audience wouldn’t have grown if we hadn’t done the following:
We published several Notes every day
Since we’re three writers, we have an unfair advantage because we can fuel the publication through three different profiles. We quickly learned that Notes is a powerful tool to attract attention, so we dove all-in and published various Notes per day.
We built a strong archive on the publication
This was easy: We’ve published dozens of posts and workshops in the past, so we were able to just copy-paste them over to Substack to immediately build an attractive backlog for subscribers:
This allowed us to create an appealing catalog and attract our first paid subscribers at $8/month or $80 on our annual plan:
We engaged with the community & studied the platform
This is the most inefficient yet effective part of our strategy: We talked to the community.
We left comments.
We replied to comments on our own content.
We joined conversations.
We listened.
We read.
We paid attention to everything happening on the platform and analyzed well-performing content.
And we started private conversations via direct messages.
Week #2: Building Consistency
In the second week, we focused on:
Building our catalog by publishing long-form posts and video workshops (mostly behind the paywall)
Engaging with as many writers as possible to build genuine connections
And publishing several Notes per day
Since Notes is currently one of Substack’s most promising growth layers, we quickly realized it’d be worth experimenting with different formats to see what works best.
Many of our early Notes didn’t get much engagement, but they helped us build consistency, understand the platform, and share different perspectives:
While you probably cannot create three versions of yourself to write endless Notes and new posts, you can indeed aim to be consistent and create a sense of community on the platform.
Aim to publish at least one Note a day. Notes can’t be scheduled, so we recommend you make consistency easy for yourself by saving inspiration and notes on an external note-taking tool. Or batch-write your Notes on one day of the week.
Use Notes to test ideas, share your personal take on the topic you write about, and communicate with those who engage with your content.
And while doing that, aim to publish 2–4 longer form pieces per month.
Notes is great to get attention but your readers will subscribe to your long-form content. That’s why we built a large backlog quickly.
Week #3: Understanding Collaboration Features
In our third week, we crossed 300 subscribers just by showing up consistently, engaging with the community, and making our existing audience aware of the fact that we’re now on Substack:
Once we got into a consistent publishing flow and understood the basics of the platform, we started to explore the community and collaboration features on Substack.
And let me tell you one thing: There are a lot of ways to collaborate with other writers on Substack and community plays a huge role.
Some people refer to Substack as a social newsletter platform since the social element is crucial to the overall experience of users.
If you are considering writing on Substack, be prepared for a significant amount of community engagement to drive growth. This includes commenting, having meaningful conversations, and consistent interaction on the platform.
You can:
Cross-post each other’s articles
Collaborate on long-form posts
Restack other’s Notes (similar to Retweeting)
Send private messages
Engage in Chat threads
Recommend each other’s publications to gain new subscribers
And much more!
While these features are useful for experienced writers with existing networks, they’re harder to leverage when you’re just starting out.
That’s why you want to connect and quickly build a sense of community, which is what we did next..
Week #4: Building Community & Connections
The fourth week marked the end of the Note-writing cohort we participated in, which was great timing since we got close to 400 subscribers and were now ready to take the next steps:
At this point, we knew that community and collaboration are the most powerful growth opportunities, so we started to talk to dozens of writers.
We hopped on calls with brilliant minds like Veronica Llorca-Smith, Russell Nohelty, David McIlroy, Michael Lim, and Landon Poburan.
And our assumptions quickly got confirmed: Having a strong support system can make all the difference on Substack.
Based on that insight, my partner Philip started to build a private Mastermind Community to create a space that would allow top writers to connect, collaborate, and grow together.
He talked to hand-picked writers to pitch the idea and a few weeks later, we hosted the kick-off call for a private Mastermind Community specifically for Substack writers.
We meet for weekly calls and host member-only trainings to learn from each other’s experiences, and it’s an understatement to say that the community led to our biggest learnings so far.
Week #5: Refining Our Paid Offer
One of the lessons we picked up quickly is that subscribers in our niche love to have a live training element on the paid tier.
Based on that idea, we used this week to initiate our member-only Roundtables, which happen once per month.
This format allowed us to meet our subscribers on a live Zoom call so we got a better understanding of their problems and questions:
Week #6: Learning From Our Audience
Alright, things are getting sexy now!
Our sixth week marked the big change we decided to make in order to get the Bestseller badge as quickly as possible, but first, we started by publishing the replay of our Roundtable session from the previous week:
The session was called Everything you need to know before you write on Substack and helped us understand what kinds of questions new writers on the platform have.
The Roundtable also showed us that many of our existing clients were actually interested in learning more about Substack.
With that learning, we decided to create various trainings to guide our clients through the first steps on the platform.
Week #7: Developing Our Launch Idea
After various conversations and deep research, we found out that many popular Substack publications gain the majority of their paid subscribers through dedicated promotions, launches, and flash sales.
Instead of relying on their content to convert subscribers from free to paid, they actively promote their paid tiers.
Some do this only a few times per year, others do it every month.
Since we have a combined experience of 20+ years in the online business and marketing spaces, we were excited to apply our knowledge from those fields to our publication.
And our first idea for a paid promotion was as simple as it could be: We launched the Substack September Bootcamp.
It was a month full of live trainings for our paid subscribers to share everything we’ve learned on our journey on Substack over the past weeks.
Those trainings were based on questions we received from our audience and the topics we explored during the first Roundtable session.
We know this is very meta — a Substack bootcamp for Substack writers. But our entire business is all about supporting writers, so this idea was perfectly on-brand and since we had already validated that our existing clients were interested in learning more, we knew it was a good idea.
Next, we created an attractive Bootcamp schedule and started to work on the promo materials:
Week #8: Launch Preparations!
We wanted to kick off the Bootcamp at the beginning of September, so we used the week before to prepare for the launch and announce the upcoming events.
Week #9: Go-Time 🎉
Go-time! After weeks of preparation, we finally put the word about the Substack September Bootcamp out there:
Once we announced the Bootcamp, we quickly gained dozens of paid subscribers and crossed our first $1,000 in paid subscriptions:
We used the hype to continue to share our own progress and encourage other writers:
Even after receiving the Bestseller badge, we continued to promote the Bootcamp to make sure our subscribers were aware of the opportunity to join the live events if they upgraded to the paid tier:
And even after the Bootcamp started, we shared snippets of each training to show our free subscribers what they were missing.
We also published the recordings of each training for paid subscribers who couldn’t join live. These posts continued to generate new paid subscribers since a short free preview is available for all of them:
🚀 Everything YOU wanted to know about getting started and growing on Substack
🛠️ Prepared for Success: How to Leverage Smart Tools to Grow on Substack
💬 How to Promote Your Paid Substack Tiers and Leverage Social Media as an Author
TL;DR — Here’s What You Should Do If You’re New to Substack and Want to Grow Your Audience, Income, and Impact
There you have it — that was our nine-week journey to becoming Substack Bestsellers in record time.
Realistically, you’ll need more time to establish your publication if you’re starting at zero and don’t have an audience or existing connections yet.
But even in that case, it makes sense to follow our plan (with an adjusted timeline):
Start by setting up your publication for a clear target audience and build a backlog of content that is attractive to your ideal readers. Aim for at least 3–4 long-form pieces.
Publish Notes right away. Aim for at least one a day — ideally even more.
Engage with every single comment you receive and build genuine connections with your readers.
Search for other writers in your niche and connect with them via direct messages to seek collaboration opportunities.
Once your free subscriber list has a decent size (the exact number depends on your niche and offer), launch your paid tier with a proper campaign.
How We’re Continuing to Grow the Write • Build • Scale Publication
After celebrating major wins on the platform within our first months, we’re excited to invest even more of our resources into our Substack publication and audience in 2025.
We’re continuing to host monthly live workshops — here are a few more trainings we hosted in 2024:
📝 How To Design Your Publication For Increased Subscriber Growth
🗂️ How To Get More Paid Subscribers By Using Monthly ‘Themes’ On Substack
Our content plan
We’ll adjust our own content strategy to work with monthly topics in 2025. Each month will have a specific theme so we can help our readers achieve tangible goals.
We’ll publish Notes, posts, and even videos on that topic and the monthly training will be dedicated to it as well.
This will allow us to be even more clear about the value we provide for our subscribers.
Plus, it helps us work with a specific content plan.
Our experiments
We love to execute quickly and be in the trenches to explore new features as Substack ships them.
When Substack launched Live Videos, Philip hosted several streams right away:
Our collaborations
As mentioned before, the conversations in our Mastermind Community are a crucial part of our journey.
Getting from 0 to 100 paid subscribers was a fun and quick journey.
But getting from 100 to 1,000 will require a whole different strategy and significantly more effort. That’s why we’re all-in on connections and collaborations with other creators.
For example, we launched the Substack Mastermind Monday posts where we future several inspiring Notes every week to put our community members in the spotlight:
Our recommendations
Another significant growth layer is the recommendations feature, which already helped us gain over 1,000 new subscribers:
We see a huge potential in recommendations and will continue to use them to our advantage.
Our premium content library
Most importantly, we’ll continue to build our library so our subscribers love to spend time on the Write • Build • Scale publication. This includes free and paid content, Notes, posts, videos, and much more.
We have big plans for 2025 and are thrilled to have you with us on this exciting journey.
How we can support YOU
Kudos for reading this far!
At this point, you might ask yourself how our work can help YOU grow your audience, publication, and income.
Well, there are a few different ways we can work together:
If you’re new to Substack or a new writer in general, become a paid subscriber to learn from our existing content and trainings.
If you’re committed to taking your Substack publication to the next level, want to grow faster, or finally get that Bestseller badge, you might be a great fit for our Substack Mastermind Community. The community is invite-only, so if you’re interested, check the details here.
If you’re interested in collaborating (e.g., through recommendations), shoot a private message to Philip Hofmacher and let us know what you have in mind!
THANK YOU for being with us on the journey to our first Bestseller badge. The first months here have been amazing but what we have in mind for 2025 is even more exciting.
Onto the next badge! 🔥
@Sinem Günel , @Philip Hofmacher , @Jari Roomer - I love the fact that you have 3 of you to support one another while you support other writers/creators. As mentioned very meta in a good way in my way of thinking about things. I also appreciate that you lay out your process and thinking along the way so others can learn and grow as you continue to. Looks like a great model to me.
Thanks for sharing. Well worth the read.
Such generous sharing and easy to implement strategy. Thank you.
It did make me laugh that your subtitle is over the picture of the three of you ;)